YU YU HAKUSHO #8 + EUREKA SEVEN #7 -- Watch & Learn

At last, one of the characters in these shows finally conducts his
business #inthesauna (go here for an explanation.)

I’m not quite sure what it says about the rest of the show when I’m
enjoying Renton get bullied by the rest of the Gekkostate crew this much, but
this was just a hoot. The kid’s been such an eager beaver this whole
time, it’s actually inconceivable to say that these older kids wouldn’t
be tormenting him like this. Such pranking fits right into this crew being a
bunch of goofballs (as I’ve brought up so many times already,) though I’m not
sure if I’m necessarily preferring their glaring unprofessionalism so much as just appreciating it as a novel
alternative to the upright respectability we usually find in the heroes of shows
like this.

Honestly, I'd almost prefer if Gekkostate just abandoned their (still
ill-defined) conflict with the bad guys (?) in the gray suits and spent the
rest of EUREKA 7 shirking whatever responsibilities they had to just do dumb
shit like this until the money run out and everybody had to move back to their
parents’ places. It’d be the ultimate mean joke to play on Renton. Making him
go through all that drama of leaving home in the hope that he was going on some
grand adventure, only for it to amount to as much as an internship at start-up
that goes bankrupt.

Watch this episode, “Absolute Defeat,” here and decide for yourself, then
read my comments on the previous episode here.

The infamous "boy band" promo for YU YU HAKUSHO.

With this episode, YU YU HAKUSHO’s swung the pendulum a closer back to
the ghostly sitcom hijinks I enjoyed so much earlier, balancing it better with
the shonen stuff. I don’t know if I should be getting alarmed that the jagged,
blue-and-black banding in Hiei’s hair reminds a little of Yu-Gi-Oh’s, though. You
lunatics have all let me know that this show’s influenced basically every
shonen that came after it… but I don’t know if I could handle it becoming more
like that one.

I’m a little confused by why Yusuke isn’t letting his girlfriend into
this particular ring of trust yet. Wasn’t she already let in when he came to
her in a dream during that whole bid to wake himself up from the coma? How hard is
he trying to keep this secret in the rest of his life, anyway? He’s a super
hero in the broad definition, sure, but he’s not a superhero with an alias or a
disguise to make people think it’s anybody but him who’s fighting these demons
out in the open.

Even if I’m a little vexed about that, I’m pretty well convinced that
this kid’s got a subconscious, but focused, death wish. He makes a throwaway
line about his ghost gun possibly killing him if that ricochet gambit didn’t
work out, right? This kid’s trying to get himself killed. Maybe this is one of
those sub-textual EVANGELION-like motivations that’s going to be explored more
explicitly when the series inevitably turns darker?

This episode was titled "The Three Eyes of Hiei." Look it up
and decide for yourself, then read my comments on the previous episode here.

It's true, Yusuke definitely has some demons inside that he eventually has to work through. But those don't get touched on much for a few arcs. Keep in mind that the dub, while AMAZING and among the best anime has ever experienced, is FAR from accurate to the source material (which is very flat, more serious than even Dragonball Z for the most part.) The dub cast, Justin Cook (Yusuke) in particular, made Yu Yu stand out, but along with that comes some lines that might seem to have connotations not intended by the original author (AKA not a forebearer of things to come).

BTW since these episodes aren't available to watch online, do you think you could just give a one-sentence rundown of what happened in the episode you're watching? It gets kind of tricky to keep track of how far you are.

Not going to comment on yu yu except to say go back to splitting them so I don't have to scroll past the pictures of them. The show would have interested me less if they didn't get somewhat serious with Eureka Seven but I do wish they had handled the seriousness better. The whole thing though of non-serious surfers finding something they actually cared enough about to get serious about I liked. To many people in our culture that don't have anything they care enough about to take seriously.